Migrations and Globalizations: Transdisciplinary and transnational Perspectives

Migrations and Globalizations: Transdisciplinary and Transnational Perspectives

Call for papers

REG Vol. 4 Nº 8

may-june 2025

Deadline for submissions: march 10th, 2025

The Journal of Global Studies. Historical Analysis and Social Change is accepting articles for the special issue ‘Migrations and Globalizations: Transdisciplinary and Transnational Perspectives,’ which will feature guest editors Ronaldo Munck, Professor of Sociology at Dublin University, and Luz
Espiro, Associate Researcher at Dublin University.

Thematic Focus
To understand migration today, we need to place it within its historical context. In the modern era, the advance of capitalism saw migrants as individuals forced to move, whether in chains or through other forms of labour, in conditions of servitude. Today, in the first quarter of the 21st century, we are witnessing, as Gambino and Sacchetto describe, "various attempts to re-discipline
migratory flows" (Gambino & Sacchetto, 2014). These migrants, seen as a threat to society, face the most explicit and severe barriers. There is also, as they describe, an insidious “regimentation of migratory flows through bureaucratic procedures,” especially through formal and informal hiring of workers in destination countries.
The global economic crisis of 2008, first, and the one triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic in
2020, later, intensified trends of unequal economic growth, generating labour market
restructurings that impacted migratory patterns. Migrant groups have been among the most affected social sectors by the pandemic, especially in the Global South. Pandemic control measures resulted in migration control and exclusion practices, inaugurating a new version of the
migration governance paradigm, aiming to make human movement “safe, orderly, and regular.”
In this way, we are witnessing “a process of re-bordering the world" and the re-emergence of crisis discourses associated with politically produced human movement (Domenech, 2023).
Added to this are the effects of environmental degradation on the changing climate situation, generating new population displacements. However, this intensification of migratory and border controls articulated at global, regional, national, and local scales, as well as the intensification of violence in the world in general and in the Global South in particular, has also revitalized migrant
struggles.

The agency and autonomous strategies of migrants for movement and survival constantly face a migratory machinery that seeks to regulate their flows and move them through unitary and controllable channels. The whirlwind of migration, now as in the past, is not easily controlled in practice. Migrants pursue their own legitimate interests and goals that drive them to move, often outside state objectives. It is crucial to recognize that "mobility policies" in the context of capitalism do not simply represent a unilateral exercise of exclusion and domination by the state and the law, but rather a dynamic and conflictive process where subjective movements and migrant struggle plays an active and essential role (Mezzadra, 2012).
We need to understand the complexity of migration in the era of globalizations as it is a process with multiple intersections. It is not simply that globalization removes barriers to the movement of people as it has done with the flow of capital, finance, images, and consumer goods. As Papastergiadis says, "the turbulence of migration is evident, not only in the multiplicity of paths but also in the unpredictability of changes associated with these movements" (Papastergiadis,
2000: 56). Only through this lens of complexity can we make sense of migratory flows today.
There are no concrete and strict limits between forced and voluntary migration, regular and irregular migration, or between “economic” and “non-economic” migrants. Migratory flows “include people on the move with mixed motivations and life circumstances, tracing complex
trajectories in transnational social fields (with previous migrations, multiple border-crossing
experiences, work, among others)” (Espiro and Vecchioni, 2023: 97). Above all, as John Urry says, "these migration patterns must be seen as a series of turbulent waves. With a hierarchy of whirlpools and vortices, with globalism as a virus that stimulates resistance, and the migration system as a cascade moving away from any apparent state of equilibrium" (Urry, 2000: 23).
Our emphasis, in general, will be on the complexity of migratory movements and South-South migration, decentring the corridors emphasized from a European or US perspective. Migration has occupied a central place in political debates in various parts of the world in recent years and transforms (for better or worse) the lives of hundreds of millions of people who migrate each year.
Migratory dynamics also involve people from communities of origin who, voluntarily or
involuntarily, remain immobile but participate in the migratory phenomenon. Thus, we witness how migration, as well as transforming entire societies at all points of migratory routes, in a continuum of origin-destination points, also integrates into the transnational migratory field those
who do not migrate. Thus, clearly, we must look beyond the nation-state as a self-sufficient domain where migration occurs, a still dominant trend where methodological nationalism is not truly questioned (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002).

Suggested (non-exclusive) thematic lines:

• Current migratory processes in the face of the impact of economic and post-pandemic
  restructurings.
• Climate change, migration, and the humanitarian issue.
• Themes, patterns, and trends in migration governance in different regions of the world /or/ Regional agendas of current migration regimes.
• Migrant agency and strategies in the face of structural inequalities.
• Migrant transnationalism or transnationalized societies.
• Activism and migration.
• Migration, civil society, and social transformation.
• Cultural diversity in destination societies and diversity policies.
• Migration and the Global South, challenges in knowledge production.
• Migrant protagonism in research and teaching about migration.

This special issue seeks transdisciplinary contributions that explore these thematic areas with theoretical and empirical robustness, providing new perspectives and analyses on contemporary migrations in the current global context.

Guidelines for authors: https://revistas.um.es/reg/about

References:

Domenech, Eduardo (2023). II Conferencia internacional “Promover la Vida en las Fronteras, 21 a 23 de marzo, Universidad Iberoamericana Tijuana, Centro Scalabriniano de Estudios Migratorios y Servicio Jesuita a Refugiados México Tijuana, México.
Espiro, M. Luz y Vecchioni, Sabrina (2023). Estereotipos de género en la movilidad humana: reflexiones y desafíos desde Argentina, Migración y Desarrollo, 21(40), 93-118
https://doi.org/10.35533/myd.2140.mle.spv
Gambino, Ferruccio y Sacchetto, Devi (2014). The Shifting Maelstrom: From Plantations to
Assembly-Lines. En Van der Linden, Marcel y Roth, Karl Heinz (Eds.). Beyond Marx. Theorising the Global Labour Relations of the Twenty-First Century. Chicago: Haymarket.
Mezzadra, S. (2012). Capitalismo, migraciones y luchas sociales. La mirada de la autonomía.
Nueva Sociedad, 237, 159–178.
Papastergiadis, Nikos (2000). The Turbulence of Migration. Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Urry, John (2000). Sociology Beyond Societies. Mobilities for the Twenty First Century. Londres: Routledge
Wimmer, A.; Glick Schiller, N. (2002) “Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migration and social sciences”. Global Networks, 2, 4.